From a very early age I’ve had a moth-like fascination for this thing called religion. Circling at a distance so as not to singe my wings, I observed my elders. Were they addled? Why would they turn off their brains and believe such fantasies? I pondered such questions at the age of six. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that that my instincts were truly perceptive.
Religions are damnably dangerous. All of them are cults. I can say this categorically because not one of them, not a single world model addresses a couple of essential existential features, and that shortcoming shows that they are seriously deficient.
First, no religion explains the real nature of the relationship between us and God (and with each other). All that stuff about neighbors, treating each other as brothers and sisters, who is in my family and who is not, this tribe and that tribe, the chosen people, Good Samaritans, turning your cheek seven times seven . . . It may seem as is the matter is being dealt with, but this isn’t not so. There’s a far more intimate involvement between all forms of life that organized religions have no inkling of and can't hint at.
And that would be enough to damn them. However, the second deficiency is even more damning. It is this: No system of belief addresses the nature of time. None of them explains how time operates. That understanding is crucial. Unless you have it, you can’t read any meaningful pattern into the warp and woof of the universe.
Okay, it’s time now for a change of scenery. At this point, let me welcome another character to the cast. A big hand, please, for Mr Einstein. He’s come here at my behest. I admire the man so much that I’m adding him to my chain of predecessors. How about that then? He’s going to be another forebear of mine.
I see, you say. But how would I manage that? Or rather how would Dog? Because, you see, there are certain complications.
But wait, let me finish. I haven’t properly introduced the man. What? You don’t think that I need to? Why is that? Oh I see—he’s so well known. But you’re making an assumption there, you realize.
Isn’t it strange how we jump to conclusions? There must be thousands of people who share the same surname. How did you decide that I wasn’t referring to his son, say, or his uncle? Or even someone from another family altogether? What made you home in on old Albert? Is he more important than everyone else? How so?
Let me ask you something else. When I mentioned the name Einstein, you would have visualized the man. Okay then, can you tell me how he appeared in your mind’s eye. What features stood out?
You’d probably describe Albert’s shock of white hair, his mustache and rumpled clothes. That’s amazing. Because I bet that you’ve never met him. Nope, you must be thinking of a photograph—probably one that was taken near the end of his life (the one where he sticks out his tongue at the camera is a favorite). But do you know—his hair was once cut short. It used to be black. Why not picture him as he was then? Why did you choose to picture him as an old man?
Here’s another quickie for you. Answer me this: How old is Einstein? No, not his age in the picture you chose, but in actual fact. Very well, that shouldn’t be too tough to work out. You take Einstein's birth year and you subtract it from what year it happens to be now. Hey presto, there's your answer. But are you sure? Say we have 2012 minus 1879. That makes one hundred and thirty three.
Heavens to Murgatroyd! How many 133-year old people do you know? Can you visualize someone that old? And if you can, wouldn’t that creature resemble Gollum more than Albert Einstein? It doesn't bear thinking about, does it? It doesn't sit comfortably, nor does it make sense.
If Albert (Einstein) had died at his peak in a car crash like Diana, the consensus, most likely, would be that he is about 36 years old. It doesn't compute to us that a body keeps aging after it dies (although a corpse’s fingernails and beard are said to keep growing for a few days). Someone who lived a good long innings, though, and who was memorable for several events during their lifetime—how old do you imagine them (assuming they’ve left the land of the living)? It's a weird thing to consider, don't you think?
How about you? Never mind how old you actually are, how old do you feel yourself to be? And does that perceived age change with time? By that I mean that as time passes, does your self-image age too? Does it keep pace with the clock, or by another ratio? And maybe it isn’t uniform—it speeds up or slows down according to your physical condition, health, or life circumstances.
See our little spark. Unhindered by geography, it leaps lightly around the world. It skips blithely across time, allowing us to experience ourselves in a multitude of bodies, both simultaneously and overlapping. Behold now that spark flare several orders of magnitude. I’m going to up its power (this spark is going supernova). Fasten your seat-belts. Warp infinity here we come. It’s time to tackle time travel.
To do that, we’ve got to circle around and sneak up on it. Shh . . .
I am here.
You are here.
Every single instant, we are neatly self-contained. The illusion is of a wondrous separateness—individuality, independence, autonomy, free will and choice. Life feels filled to the brim with potential. Well, it should. This is a carnival, you know.
We realize its boundaries: birth and death. We observe them when others pass across them. This knowledge serves to snip us off from one another even more sharply. Everyone occupies his or her (gender is yet a further distinction) quarter-acre patch of reality. We’re fenced off from everyone else, including God.
But dammit, we are God. We’re wrapped up in that containing consciousness. We are one another. We are one. ONE. US. I. Ism.
I wake up from a dream in which I was a butterfly. Or am I really a butterfly dreaming of being a man? I wonder, is the dream state more ‘real’ than wakeful consciousness?
After all, we only dip into wakeful waters for a matter of hours before needing to recharge our batteries. By contrast, you never become exhausted in the sleep state and just have to wake up. It's not as if you run out of oxygen.
Nevertheless, we don’t question that the waking state is higher than mere sleep. Of course it must be. Isn’t our level of consciousness greater when we’re up and about? It seems so, but maybe that’s another ‘obvious’ assertion to test.
Leave consciousness out of it for the moment. Instead, let’s do an assessment of quality of being. Specifically, let’s consider our depth of connectedness to each other, the planet, the universe and our roots. We’ll compare how we do when we’re asleep, as opposed to when we’re awake. In which of the two states are we more ‘at one’?
When you open your eyes, you take on an aura of individuality and otherness. The illusion is of being a separate entity. You’re here behind the rays that shine into your eyes. Things exist ‘out there’. Time feels real, space feels real, and the cinematography of our lives feels as if it's occurring. The reels roll, we’re mesmerized, and we enjoy the drama from the comfort of our seat.
But we slough all of that off when we sleep. At that time we’re centred. We return to our origins where it is natural to be, and we draw nourishment from being there. Don’t we feel freshest in the early part of the day just after we’ve arisen? And conversely, don’t we feel dullest at day’s end?
Since this is so, then I conclude that wakefulness is not our default state. We’re not naturally wakeful beings who sometimes need to sleep. We are the one source that dips regularly into wakefulness to enjoy the experience of those dreams, which makes us not so much a butterfly as a cocoon.
Another thing is that we assume that the adult form is more advanced than the immature version. The pupa grows not only in size but in wisdom, supposedly, as our memories accumulate. But I wonder about that. Just as I’m coming around to think that the wakeful state is inferior to the sleep state, I’m starting to hypothesize that the child is the father to the man.
In one of my dreams I go into a mall with people walking about everywhere. There’re all types, all races, and I’m struck with their variety and beauty. I look into everyone’s eyes (especially if the people are women and if their eyes are brown) and then I suddenly stagger and have to reach out for support.
I’ve just had an epiphany. Now I know what it means to be God! In every pair of eyes I see consciousness swim. This pulsing matrix of humanity is omnipresence all ready to blow. It’s like a fire that just needs a match. Am I the only one who understands? We’re only a spark away from the realization that all is one. We’re just a membrane away from grokking ourselves for what we are, will be and always were: the timeless entirety. Imagine the simultaneous smile when that light dawns!
It is a curious phenomenon, but from any position of the worm’s body we have the ability to look back in one direction only. We are able to ‘see’ along our body in that direction, which we label the past, but we can’t see the other way, upstream, into the future. It’s as though a half of us is buried in mud (out of which we're slowly rising).
We possess theoretical knowledge of our feet underground, but our actual awareness of that part of our body is very limited. Intellectually we grasp that we stretch in that direction, but we have no idea how far. Because we have much less vision ‘upstream’, we declare that it hasn’t happened yet, and we call that the future. But that’s not correct. In reality, there exists just the one continuum. Every point within it is as real as another.
Re-enter the spark. Gentle as a butterfly, it alights along our tube’s length like a finger playing chopsticks. Or, because of the eye-blurring speed with which it performs, it may be imagined as a giant hand playing all eighty-eight keys at once—a chord more powerful than the all the grand pianos at the end of Sergeant Pepper.
Time, then, is nothing more than an illusion. It is the phenomenon that results from our (limited) ability to see or remember along one of the dimensions of our being. It is the equivalent of our ability to look down the length of only one outstretched arm. The other is shrouded in thick mist. Time vision is like a diode that allows electricity to travel one way only.
Suppose that someone is afflicted by not being able to retain memories—neither long-term nor short. For such a person time would have no significance, because you cannot sense the passage of time unless you have the abilty to compare the present with at least one previous imprint. Perhaps it’s like that for animals. Perhaps it’s like that for people with Alzheimer’s. Their lives would be lived entirely in the present. Maybe their perception of life is more accurate than ours.
But we’ve strayed from our brief. Let’s return to the topic thread. We were speaking of the spark that leaped. Very well then, after every such leap our consciousness quantum brings to life its host’s complete store of background memories. It is instantly updated.
However, that moment can occur at any point of the host’s life. Any point is as good as another. There is no objective ‘now’, you see. The present is no more special or real than any point in the host’s past or future. I may have started this book in say 2005, completed the first edition in 2010, be working on the second edition, ‘now’, in 2012, but who knows when you’ll read it? And when you read it for the second time? And when you loan it to a friend?
It’s like the universe expanding a thousand-fold. You wouldn’t be aware of it. You wouldn’t know that time was jumping about at random. At any point in your life, whether it’s your twenty-first, the day of your first marriage, or the day that the doctor tells you that you have six months to live, that instant would be perceived as the cutting face of life thus far. Click your heels together, and you could be anywhen.
Let me modify what I just said. That’s not how I meant it exactly. It’s not that there’s no time. I’m just saying that it may not be as how we imagine it. No, time is not what we’ve been brought up to believe. It is merely the measure of the distance between two points. You use it to drive from one city to another.
When you do, features that lie along the way do not ‘cause’ others to happen. This forest is not the ‘bad karma’ from having crossed such and such a bridge. This roundabout is the not the effect caused by that field of sheep six miles back, or by that hill up ahead. And this reasoning applies to our lives also.
A bulge in one part of our jabberwocky body does not cause a depression in another—for example a knee causing an elbow. The whole jabberwocky exists all at once. Examined from ‘above’, the creature is always fully formed. You only seem to make time move when you shift your gaze from one part of its body another. Your vehicle may seem to cause the road to move too, but we’re agreed, I hope, that it doesn’t?
I admit that this way of interpreting time turns our whole concept of life topsy-turvy. All of a sudden there is no cause and effect, no free-will, and no chance happenings. There are no choices to be made. There’s no karma going on that we’ve got to watch out for. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are now terms that hold little meaning.
Life, or lifespan, is largely an illusion. It is merely a string of conscious moments that does not exist as a unit in reality. But let’s put one under the microscope.
A life has a certain span, yet it’s only at the moment of death that we know how many years long. At any given moment we have a height, width and length that may be measured (just as any particular size corresponds to a time—or times—in life). Are you with me so far?
Emotionally we appear to have more invested in the fourth dimension than in any other. We don’t mourn the fact that our maximum reach is five or six feet from head to toe. So why do we work ourselves up over three score and ten? Death is merely the dead skin that lies at your periphery. It’s just the air that breezes across your scalp. It’s just how far your body reaches in that direction.
At this stage I’d like to introduce an alternate way for how time operates. I’ll demonstrate that it’s a dynamic phenomenon that can be brought about through a static process. I’m not going to ram it down your throat. I just want to admit that it holds water, that it’s airtight and that it could stand firm.
We’ll begin where we left off: that time is a collection of instants. In other words, time is quantized, discrete, digital or particulate (enough synonyms already). I suggest that consciousness results when a set of memory moments is uploaded into a particular instant. Now then, if this includes the awareness of a set of other 'consciousness-quanta', together with their cqs, nestled and contained . . .
Rats, I've lost you again.
How am I going to do this? How did Einstein keep it simple?
Okay, picture this. Have you ever created your own cartoon? Maybe back at school during an especially dull lesson you might have drawn a little figure down in the corner of your exercise book. On the next page you drew it again, but slightly altered, and again on the following pages. When you reached the end, you had something to show your friends. You told them to look as you flipped through the pages. Your stick figure skipped, walked, ran, jumped and flew (you were inventive). In essence, you brought your little animus to life.
In reality, of course, our little fellow doesn’t move. It’s static. It appears to move when we bring it alive, and maybe that’s what it thinks of itself too. But before you smile indulgently at Mr Stick, consider this. Perhaps on a higher plane the same principle applies to us.
Perhaps ‘upstairs’ some mechanism is operating to flip through a book of our leaves. Perhaps a wind is blowing through the pages of our calendar. There could be a giant thumb progressing us through time. We appear to be alive, but that may only be apparent. To our selves our bodies seem fully fleshed, but on a higher level we may just appear to be transparencies.
And the way that this illusion could be brought about is through memories. They might be the driving force. Memories, as an awareness of a set of other moments of awareness, could be the key. We define that set of memory awarenesses as ‘our past’. We know they have happened. Or, more accurately, we say they have happened because we know about them. It feels as if we have lived through those moments.
To illustrate what I mean let’s look at birthdays. Mine, if you like. Shall we start with my tenth?
At that age, I hold the memories of my ninth, eighth, seventh and-so-on birthdays in my head. The memory of each of them includes the memories of all previous ones (at nine I remember 8, 7, 6 . . . at eight I remember 7, 6, 5 . . .) They come tucked inside one another like Russian nesting dolls.
What that nesting gives rise to is the passage of time. It has the effect of flipping pages without any action needing to occur. Nested memories flip without any external help. You see, whatever age you are, you see that as the latest in a chain of memory instants. This produces the illusion that you just have arrived there, as if having just stepped off bus.
Now, the flipping does not need to happen in a particular order. Imagine that you’d drawn your stick figures on a deck of cards. If then you shuffle them, you’ll witness the most amazing thing. It doesn’t alter the illusion! I’ll say it again because this is important: shuffling the deck doesn’t make a scrap of difference. In every case it will seem that life proceeds in an orderly fashion. How could that be?
Pick any random multi-digit number. 4534644 will do (a previous phone number). Have each of those numerals represent a birthday. Next, let’s flitz through those years.
At a given moment you find that you are four years old. Great. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how old you are now. You are not surprised; after all, you remember 1, 2 and 3. Four is just how old you are at present.
From there, let’s say that your awareness flitzes to age five. Well and good—you’ve aged as expected. You remember being 1, 2, 3 and 4. Five is simply how old you are at present.
But then suddenly you are three. How will that work? Let’s see. You remember being 1 and 2, so you’ve aged as expected. You have no memory of being 4 or 5, so they must be still in your future. Three is how old you are at the present. You have aged as expected from 2. That’s all that you know.
At any age, the previous birthdays are nicely nested. You never have pre-knowledge of years in the ‘future’, so from your vantage point (and from those of your parents) there is nothing unusual going on.
When you hit four for the second time (though it may as well be the 10th or 100th) you don’t do a double take. You don’t even suffer déjà vu. As far as you’re concerned, you’ve just turned four after having been 1, 2 and 3. You haven’t retained anything from when you were four previously.
Jumping from four to six, you don’t perceive any gap, because when you turn six all your memories from 1 through 5 are instantly uploaded. The last birthday party that you can recall is your fifth, ergo you have lived it. Been there, done that.
In this way, every jump in any direction—forwards in time, backward, and even sideways—poses no problem at all for Mr Stick.
A deck of cards is all that you need to make time pass. You don’t even need a thumb flipping through them. Leave it sitting on a shelf if you like. No sleight of hand is needed. It’s active without any help. It’s alive. It whirrs and pulsates and a little light flashes (maybe a virtual electron leaping from one energy state to another). The nested nature of its consciousness moments causes it to happily imagine itself alive and passing time. It hums and purrs contentedly like a screen saver.
Isn’t this nifty? We now have a model for life, or rather one particular lifetime. A creature’s life is simply a set of instants. Each instant contains an awareness of its other (‘past’) instants. It’s hardwired into them. It may be that this set is subset, although it could also be the universal set (how’s your New Math?). Creatures are separate only if their consciousness instants have no awareness of each other’s. If you can't remember it, you can't lay claim to it
Let’s work this model a little harder.
Okay, so a life form has access to a set of memories. We call the whole a life. And we know that memory awareness is like an arrow pointing back in time.
Now, each time moment contains within itself a nested subset, or the memory-awareness of other moments (imagine a Venn diagram with subsets that get smaller and smaller (perhaps an onion (that does not need to be of glass (or contain a walrus)))) then, within the context or paradigm of continuous expansion, growth or progress, this makes it seem that time flies forward. (Within a paradigm of shrinkage or disappearance it ought to result in the opposite: that time is progressing into the past.)
Similarly, you appear to be travelling along with it. The universe too—it seems to explode and then, after aeons, implodes back into its black hole. Whether it does so once, or else loops back on itself like a Moebius strip, or even if it oscillates repeatedly ad infinitum, doesn’t matter, since none of those cosmologies break free from the gravitational pull of the illusion of time.
Those models only seem to be kinetic, whereas from god’s point of view everything is. It is all here, complete, the alpha through to the omega. The alphabet exists as a unit. The letters don’t scroll in real time; they’re carved in stone.
All is as it is.
All particles are linked according to the laws of gravity, electromagnestism and so forth. They relate to one another as if they were separated in space and time, and though they each seem to be discrete, there is in fact no way to tell them apart.
All is indeed one.
I believe that it’s time for some light entertainment. My treat—let’s go to the movies.
When I was young, I strongly identified with the hero—Charlton Heston, Marvin Lee or Kirk Douglas. As the story wore on, I became convinced that I resembled them, and that everyone would stare at me when I exited the theatre. I fancied that I even walked the same way, so I became too self-conscious to cross the foyer. I expected people to gasp at the uncanny resemblance.
A psychologist might say that suggests either a poor sense of self or a strong sense of empathy, but I disagree. I think that movies (and novels, songs, works of art) have the potential to disengage us from the illusion of our separateness or boundedness. That is why we pay such homage to the stars when they do their job well. They perform a form of magic on us by altering our consciousness and taking us out of ourselves. They remind us of the greater reality of unity.
God gets to enjoy himself when he shares our lives. At that time we’re the actors. We’re the ones receiving homage. Think of watching a video (in the genre of The Matrix it would seem). God, always in the starring role, takes his seat to immerse herself in the best virtual reality of all: a tri-D sensaround, panasound, supersensual bio-pic.
Each movie runs for seventy or eighty years from the insider’s point of view (when the featured wildlife is human). And of course, God sees it from that point of view too. While he watches, he’s compressed within a skull.
But the overview, the bigger superpicture’s, is that there is no time. Any 'time' is as good as another; it all exists at once. Life as we know it in the present tense is but a cross section of the jabberwocky Beast. God actually watches every monitor at once, and is intimately involved with every bit of the videotape in the vault.
Whether your current life story is war, medical drama, horror or romance doesn't matter. That’s not you. It’s just the current book you’re reading. You shouldn’t worry how it’s going to end. There's nothing that can go 'wrong' with it, and there's nothing that will harm you in a permanent sense.
Really, from an overarching perspective, it is ludicrous to think along the lines of: "What kind of god could allow such things happen?" The twin towers collapsing, online beheadings, Fukushima—they seem truly horrific, callous and evil to we spectators, and a thousand times more so for the people involved, but that’s only because of the quality of the special effects. For Dog it is only a show, a game to enjoy, or an experience to relish.
Time is merely part of the mechanism that serves to separate. It allows us to view the multiplicity of the instants of our ‘being set’ as separate moments. They may be compared. “See me then, see me now,” we exclaim, “I must be changing, evolving and growing!” That is how it seems, although in reality we are part of a tableau.
Count yourself lucky if your portals are clear enough to grok what is what. Such a perspective is impermanent. I too catch only glimpses. But from where I stand now I can tell you that nothing is worth worrying about. Nothing is worth crying over. Nothing is a matter of do-or-die (though that is certainly how it feels).
Experience is the issue. Experience is the coin of this realm. The grand conspiracy makes it possible for God to experience life from the widest variety of angles. Variety has been hard-wired into our very being. We are ‘different’ so as to be able to experience our self from multitudinous points of reference. Right now, as I say, I can see that (and right now you may be able to understand). The glass in the windows of the vehicle of this particular model and brand allows me to see it. And I have this lifetime, day or instant to convey that meme.
My aim in enlightening you is purely selfish. It’s not done out of the goodness of my heart. No, I have an ulterior motive for this exercise in intellectual grooming. To be brutally honest, I dread the thought of waking up next morning trapped behind your eyes, together with the memory of all those years lived as you under whatever paradigm you follow. Ugh! The thought makes me shudder. I couldn’t stand to be you.
The whole point of my spending today—these twenty-four hours—to create this magnum opus is to make available to me (when I flitz into you) the wherewithal to escape—consider this as liberation literature. And, just as I only have this day of opportunity, so do you. You’ve discovered this text online? Download it right away and start digesting this baby: Virginia from Rickmansworth’s 100-minute bible.
